If you work in education, what do you think is causing the current attendance issues?

[NeedAnUpgrade]

I’ve read quite a lot on this recently. DD1 is 10, she’s always been reluctant to go to school. She had a spate of UTIs, stomach aches, headaches etc. She’s had a bit of time off sick but we only triggered the attendance letter recently as it went below a certain threshold. DH and I have always done our best to get her into school, being reassured that she’s ‘been fine all day’ by her teachers. It all came to a head this year (yr 5) after a complete meltdown, several anxiety attacks and refusal to leave the house. She’s now on a reduced timetable at school and on the waiting list for an ASD assessment.
Academically she’s ahead but just can’t seem to cope with the school environment.

I’m just wondering what those who work in education think the issues are. Am I just a terrible parent? Although I’m not sure what else I could do. I suspect a complete lack of funding in education has had the biggest impact on schools and students. Especially those with SEN.

Also, sending work home isn’t as easy for everyone - works for secondary school written work. But so much of my teaching in, say, numeracy, is teaching through manipulatives and then doing guided and independent practice using them, usually varied manipulatives modelling the same concept and sometimes then moving on to another way to represent it. To send home for that lesson, I’d need to write down the lesson plan for parents (which I don’t need to do for school apart from Learning Intentions, key concepts and modelling techniques using a few words, because the person who might need to use it in my absence would be a teacher and have that same knowledge) and think of materials to use. Say I’m doing a lesson on multiplication as repeated addition of equal parts and it is very early on in the teaching sequence - I may be using models of bars of the same size but made up of different coloured blocks (e.g. 5 pairs of 2 colours is the same size of a whole as 10 colours of 1 block), pairs of socks or gloves etc. and that’s just for the modelling part. I’d then do a few guided practice activities before independent work, all of this before possibly even touching on pictorial representations. As I teach 3 different levels, with a few children individualised, I’d need to have that explanation ready for three potentially different activities, depending on the concept - I’d probably have children working on at least two different outcomes of the curriculum. Anyone can print a worksheet from Twinkl to send home, but I’d then need to match it to my teaching that day (probably not worksheets) and the child might not be working on the understanding of pictorials models anyway, rendering it a bit useless. This is why I think we should also discuss the idea of just sending work home and while it’s better than nothing (absolutely!!), it’s hardly the same as being in class.

It was an issue pre-covid. My kids were school refusers 7-8 years ago. It was less prevalent than now but it did happen.

The curriculum and lack of SEN and the environment of schools and burnt out teachers caused school refusal years ago.

I can’t believe you are forcing a shaking vomiting child into a situation that causes catatonia.

She’ll never forgive you when she’s older.

Has she got an EhcP?

It’s not just the current government who’ve turned school into a uniform and attendance obsessed, data-driven processing plant though. New Labour were extremely keen on all this in the late 90s. And the Conservative government before that was very keen to standardise the curriculum and ensure testing was central to things. The rot is cross-party and deep.

And the British public are generally hugely positive about obsessive uniform policies and similar. So… joyless schools it is.

Tbh, I hated school in the 80s and 90s and saw it as something to be gotten through. I don’t think that’s new for the 21st century.

DS is off school today. He’s got a bug the main symptom of us just being utterly exhausted for a couple of days. I know this because I had the same thing and couldn’t work on Monday. Still, as I explained his absence to the school answering machine this morning I thought: they are probably going to tell him off for being absent. They’d already given them a lecture about how no one can go to the medical room in school unless they’re sick in front of a teacher etc. it’s horrible. We wouldn’t treat people in the workplace like this if they are unwell. Schools seem to adopt the kind of extreme attitude to sick leave you find in TikTok parodies of American working culture.

In our case no PRU places meaning there are a substantial number of violent and incredibly disruptive students who make life hell for everyone else, students and staff both. The MATs response is to bring in draconian disciplinary measures which make life even worse for the majority of students, while being completely ignored by the students they are aimed at (try getting a violent and aggressive 6 foot 14yo into isolation…)

The result is more and more students simply stop coming - they aren’t safe and they aren’t learning anything due to the constant disruption.

Yes to this.

And it needs to be flexible.

I was in high school in the early 1980s. My school were strict on uniform but more relaxed on other things.

1 big difference was that no one was expected to get top grades, it was nice if you did but only 20% did O Levels, and then the next 30% did CSE. 50% of children left with no qualifications.

That wasn't right, but expecting all children to achieve GCSEs isn't either.

Back in the 1990s GCSEs and GCSE equivalents were both counted in league tables. Now it is just GCSE.

Most SEN provision is now in mainstream but without the staff or money to provide extra support.

We are trying to fit all the pegs into square holes and that's fine for the square pegs.

I know CSEs were looked down on as secondary to O Levels but they provided more creative / practical work. The BTECs, OCR etc do the same but most schools have stopped doing them.

Anxiety

Not necessarily. Each country has its own culture, societal schedule (think Spain), attitude to work and social support systems. These things all contribute.

So not much has changed has it?

Still feckless parents for not harming our children by forcing them into damaging environments!

I heard all of this years ago and my goodness have some people had to eat their words given that my children, despite being school refusers, are educated at least as well as their school educated peers. They are more resilient as a result of having their needs met rather than less.

But hey, who'd listen to parents who've been there when you can form your own prejudiced views!

And I agree with @ArseInTheCoOpWindow forcing your child into a situation that harms them, and by that I don't mean a little bit anxious, doesn't make you a hero parent. It is damaging.

We are given one job to do and that is to parent our children. When school is harming our children it is our job to keep them safe from those harms. We have to fight for appropriate safe educations for our children. Sometimes our children have years of missed education because they are so damaged. This comes at immense personal and financial cost. But hey let's just blame the parents!

Lasting impact of covid on social, emotional and intellectual development.

And can you even imagine forcing an adult into work when they are vomiting, crying and shaking from fear of the workplace?

Yet this is somehow deemed appropriate for children.

It's fucking abusive. That's what it is.

After I retired and relocated, I did supply in several local schools. These were academies. They were zoos. Feral, out of control children dominated lessons and packs of them would roam corridors in between lessons. There were so many well behaved children, but they were rendered invisible by the naughty ones. There were also issues with teacher retention, especially in Science and Maths. If I were a child with social anxiety, I would have been scared to go to school. Most schools are not like this, I assume ….

@Didshejustsaythatoutloud but it's the school environment that makes all of those diagnosis desirable...not desirable to have but desirable to get your child the help they need.

Take dyslexia for example, rates for dyslexia in Italy are miniscule by comparison to English speaking countries. That isn't because they have less people with dyslexia but it does not need diagnosing because the language is so much simpler. In the UK dyslexic children are often discouraged from taking a MFL because if you have trouble with your own language why would you add another one when they could be skilled linguists in the right language.

My daughter has an autism diagnosis, if the school environment was stricter and more regimented so that others behaved, less change in teachers with lots of supply, students didn't push and shove, canteen was a positive place to be instead of chaotic then we wouldn't have needed to apply for assessment to get her support to deal with the environment. She would have managed just fine as many did in the past. It wouldn't mean she's not autistic just that she wouldn't need the diagnosis.

When students have to go to an environment that is so hostile to them it's no wonder that they are happy to take time off. I taught in the same secondary that I was a student, my time as a student was great lots of orchestra and performing arts performances, after school and lunchtime clubs, more school trips, low staff turn over, children with additional needs supported instead of TAs being used as cover. My time as a teacher was vastly different, high staff turn over, extremely poor behaviour, very little back up from some parents, short breaks to avoid fighting and having to pay lunchtime supervisors, teachers that barely get a brea and are rushed. Lots and lots of challenging behaviour from many children who would have been better off in a more specialised setting IE children with development delay intellectually around 6 years old in a GCSE class. Even bright top set children who couldn't be bothered to put the effort in, mid and lower level children often trotted out "I don't need to learn this I'm going to work with my dad", " What's the point in this I'm going to be a TikToker/Youtuber"

Hi @NeedAnUpgrade

Your DD is on the pathway for an autism assessment.
The school is not currently meeting her needs - that’s why she isn’t fine in school.

If her needs in school were being met, she would be less likely to be melting down. What has the school got in place to help her self regulate when she’s anxious? Being at home on a reduced timetable is ok but when she’s in school, what are they doing to meet her specific needs?

The teachers saying ‘she’s been fine all day’ obviously have no idea how much your DD is masking. Then once at home, she melts down - she has been holding it all in all day.

Have a read through the excellent suggestions in the SEND threads.
It’s not one thing….it’s that a large number of mainstream schools in the UK are not fit for purpose for any child….let alone a child with SEND.

The high pressure environment (even in primary settings) all day every day just isn’t good for a child who needs down time and time to regulate in order to process and take in everything. In mainstream, there just isn’t time to do that before the next thing comes along.

I think it's partly the change in parents' approach to discipline to be gentler and respect children's feelings.

I don't think that's a bad thing necessarily, but it's quite incompatible with absolute insistence that they spend a lot of time at school - which, let's face it, even when it's a good school is noisy, chaotic, a bit stressful.

Kids don't get told to stick their chin out and get on with it anymore, so lots of them don't develop the resilience you get from sticking out something tough.

I don't know what the answer is. Hybrid schools where you spend some of the week at home, and some in the classroom but overall fewer kids are in school at any time so it's quieter?

Oh and one more thing…..by year 5 (and often from year 3 onwards) children start having to use much more abstract thinking ….whereas before, they were very much teacher-led and then suddenly lessons become much more self-led, some autistic children /children with other SEND difficulties, find it tricky to manage their own time and can’t always work out how to proceeed/start.

If you’re seeing that type of thing, ask staff to help her break tasks down and give her more input in lessons, such as sentence starters.

Some children don't like school. This is nothing new. And will make up headaches sickness and so on. Some schools are simply awful.

DD struggled with school related anxiety, but she did keep slogging away with it, her anxiety has been a million times better since she left and is working.

With her the issues were many.
Friendship problems, there was a lot of bullying and she had no friends.
School rules, so many rules, she constantly worried about breaking them even though she was the last child who would do so, but the behaviour of many kids was poor and the school was big on whole class punishments.
The pressure to achieve, constant tests. There was never any downtime, loaded up with homework for holidays. Yet the schools attainment was low. Nothing fun, school closed all the clubs over covid and never reopened them.
Constant feelings of injustice over the way they were treated and lack of support.

I don't work in a school but I've been looking at the figures that came out recently. This is two schools in the same town, both with 420ish pupils, 13% free school meals, 15% ESL. Identical populations, really.

School 1.

10.4% persistent absence.
4.5% EHCP
13.1% receiving some SEN support

School 2.

19.8% persistent absence
4.3% EHCP
5.7% receiving some SEN support.

That SEN support is the difference for us. My daughter was a school refuser because school was a scary place. We moved from school 2 to school 1 and she skips in happily, with 100% attendance.

If children are happy at school they attend.

I think the government’s system of building new special schools doesn’t meet the massive need for academic autistic children. My own DS ended up in the only school available once he left mainstream but it wasn’t perfect and only offered 2 GCSEs. We had to fight to get him to do other subjects that equalled level 2 & 3 quals.

More children are autistic than ever before but nobody is building sensory schools to accommodate their need so they have to just ‘fit in’ to schools that cannot and do not cater for their need.

Covid.

Homeschooling showed me how little they covered day to day.
Same words everyday. Same sums everyday.

My son picked it up on day one then became bored.

This is primary school though, I know high school would be different.

So now I don't really bother about 100% attendance. But I'm in a country where we don't get fined for this.

In the UK dyslexic children are often discouraged from taking a MFL

This wasn’t true in the secondary school l worked in for 25 years. Nor was it true in my dyslexic son’s case. He was encouraged to do a language but didn’t like it, so didn’t take one at GCSE.

A combination of so, so many factors. Ridiculous expectations on kids (and staff), poor behaviour, parents wfh, covid, OFSTED...the list goes on.
There's a lot of autistic children who haven't made it fully back to school after covid lockdowns. They 'unmasked' during that time and simply can't go back.
Your DD sounds like classic female ASD presentation - my advice is to get her assessment before Y7 if you can and lobby school for every single reasonable adjustment you can think of as secondary schools can be an absolute bear-pit for autistic kids. Which is mostly why home-ed is rapidly on the rise and the vast majority of home-educated kids are ND.
I don't know what the solution is but as a teacher I'm in despair at the state of our education system.

As I said ipthread, it is a global problem. UNESCO release data yearly on out-of-school kids globally so will be interesting to see the next dataset.

Here's a short publication that outlines some measures other countries took to get kids back into school:

Education in a Post-COVID World: | UNICEF https://www.unicef.org/media/135736/file/Education%20in%20a%20Post-COVID%20World.pdf

I think the UK would have benefited from strong campaigns on back to school and clear guidance for schools on when it was appropriate to shut and what the arrangements would be. A lot seemed to be freestyled which left a long tail of patchy provision and institutions became seen as unreliable.

@Sweettooth33 this is exactly what we have, disruptive kids roaming the corridors being ‘shadowed’ by SLT members to ensure they don’t actually harm themselves or others. They bang on doors or burst into classrooms to threaten other students, urinate in the corridors etc. The response from the MAT has been to bring in draconian rules regarding uniform, attendance, etc - basically the slightest misdemeanour will gain you a detention.

Of course none of these rules have the slightest impact on the disruptive students (they certainly won’t be going to any detentions and any attempt to get them into isolation will result in them squaring up to you).

Everyone breathes a sigh of relief when these kids don’t turn up (which is frequently) but of course the attendance officers do everything they can to get them in.